I'm a 3d designer / animator looking into using shapeways to print some of my characters for a presentation (and, if all goes well, for possible sale).

I exported a test character in .dae format and zipped it up with the textures. The model came in fine, but the textures don't seem to have made it (or the system didn't recognize them) as the preview pic is all gray.

Also, the "Full Color Sandstone" option seems to be missing from the materials list.

3ds max has render to texture, but the process is a not so straightforward because if you have multi-subobject textures on your model, you have to flatten the uv map... I'll post the workflow when I get it to work.

Is this something folks have successfully tried when exporting from Sketchup Pro 8? I'm looking to print an object with multiple textures and colors as full color sandstone, but sadly no matter what filetype I export to, the resulting object on Shapeways is gray.

For anyone who's had success exporting from Sketchup to full color sandstone with multiple colors and textures, what settings or steps worked for you? Is there something I should be watching out for besides the 2mm minimum width requirement and being sure to use VMRL?

(And do I understand it right that VRML includes WRL + images?)

Any help is much appreciated since this is for my wife's birthday present.

In my experience, colour models for FCS are very finicky, ie getting the texture to upload with the model correctly to shapeways can be a battle.

Theres various things that can go wrong, but I can suggest a few things - first make sure the texture is mapped to every face on the model, in the past even having one face which hasnt got the texture applied will cause shapeways to reject the texture or be unable to find it.

Make sure your applying the exact same texture to the model which your also putting in the .zip and that the name is exactly the same.
I use Blender and, for example, if you open a 2nd version of a image in the program it will be named texture.001.jpg, even though the source image is named texture.jpg, exporting that model with texture.001.jpg applied to it and putting it in a .zip with texture.jpg will result in a non-textured model on shapeways.

As for the FCS material not appearing, try going into the edit page for the model on shapeways and re-enable the materia, FCS could just be disabled as a material option there, its happened to me before.

I dont know how this would work in other programs, or with other model formats for that matter, but those are some of the issues I've encountered personally.